‘Global upstream industry needs to drive digitalisation’

Created: Wednesday, 05 September 2018 09:34

The event discusses challenges and opportunities in the global upstream sector. (Image source: SPE ENGenious)SPE ENGenious, a symposium and exhibition for global upstream oil and gas industry, is being held from 4-6 September 2018, focussing on the need of driving radical digital and technological transformation across the upstream oil and gas industry

Khaled A Al-Buraik, vice-president, southern area oil operations at Saudi Aramco, delivered the keynote address at the inaugural SPE ENGenious event in Aberdeen this morning.

He said, “We must also tackle two main issues. We need to see a behavioural change as there can be apprehension when adopting new technology. Cybersecurity is the other main challenge for us as the energy industry is one of the top three targets across the world.”

“We’ve seen before that this industry, due to the ingenuity of our people and the adoption of new technology, the oil and gas industry always rises to a challenge.”

More than 1500 delegates, visitors and exhibitors are expected to attend SPE ENGenious, under the theme ‘Re-imagining the oil and gas industry.

Mr Al-Buraik was joined on stage by conference co-chairs Ahmed Hashmi, global head of upstream technology, BP and Binu Mathew, senior vice-president, global head of digital products, Baker Hughes, a GE company, together with Darcy Spady, 2018 president, SPE.

The symposium and exhibition is themed around four topics including automation and control systems, data analytics, robotics and smart communications.

ENGenious aims to provide deep technical content and provocative forward-looking strategy discussions. Sessions will highlight the latest reservoir, drilling and production software and technology innovations to enable discovery and learning.

ENGenious will host 30 industry exhibitors focused on driving radical transformation to move the upstream industry into the digital industrial era. The event’s exhibition space is free to attend for visitors and students.

AJ Abdallat, the CEO of Beyond Limits, will speak at plenary session 2 on ‘Radical Organisational Change through Digital.’ The Caltech artificial intelligence start-up has developed technologies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to support its unmanned autonomous space program. His talk will touch on lessons learned in space that inform AI development projects on earth, and how companies can drive digital innovation for positive change.